Today we start the Cowtown Phoenix Am story arc on It’s a Rough Life. It’s a six episode arc that will take Johnny and his crew through some pretty entertaining situations (we hope). And there might even be some skateboarding.

In 2010, Roughneck Hardware was a junior sponsor at the infamous Cowtown Phoenix Amateur skateboard contest. Phoenix Am, as it is known, is a proving ground for up and coming rippers. It’s also just the type of place a struggling company like Roughneck could claim real legitimacy. So after a little bit of scheming Johnny got a van, a photographer, and two of his riders in the contest. He also brought his wife and a personal hype man.

If you watch the episode you’ll notice that Johnny is headed to Phoenix Am 2010. The Phoenix material is actually the original pilot material for It’s a Rough Life. It came about, because after years of documenting Johnny’s company we realized that it was worth trying to take it a step further and make it show. Jeremey and Roughneck were both headed to Phoenix Am that year. Jeremey was going to shoot the contest for ESPN.com, and Roughneck was going for the reasons stated in the video (riders in the contest, build hype for the company). It presented a great opportunity to get in a van with the squad and get some great footage. (If we had been able to neglect the contest a little more, we could have gotten even more!) This episode sets up events for the next few. We hope you enjoy it.

In other Rough Life news, we also posted a “complete arc” version of the Roughside of the Trax 2. Its all three webisodes combined into one short film (for all those wanting more than four minutes of new Rough Life per week). It was posted today as well.

As some of you know, we’ve been working with the Roughneck squad for years.

In 2010, while Jeremey was on a trip with Roughneck to shoot the Cowtown Phoenix Am contest for ESPN.com, he shot some pilot material for what we hope to be a Roughneck reality show concentrating on Johnny’s eccentric circle of friends, family, and team riders.

We are now editing that material into a a series of webisodes that will be premiering later this year. In fact, we already have a few in the can.

ESPN posted my footage of PHX Am. This time I sent the footage their way to edit which worked out great, cause I’m working on a big job for Next Agenda at the moment and couldn’t cut it myself. Thanks to Adam Salo for hooking it up.

I rolled down to the contest with RNCK crew. If you want to see what was up with that check out my friend Christian’s blog Stick It, he’s got all the photos up there.

Stay tuned for my video of the trip. We’re piloting a RNCK show and I should have it cut up in a few weeks. It’s epic.